This is what incompetence looks like

Trump made abundantly clear on the campaign trail that he wasn’t up to the job of being president: ignorance of important basic facts about the U.S. and the world, prone to incoherent rages laced with fabrications, and a pathetic six-time business bankrupt. Now he is proving it.

In addition to being ill advised on policy grounds, his precipitate ban on refugees, and ban on all travel to the U.S. by citizens of seven nations, including by legal permanent residents of the U.S., was implemented in an utterly incompetent manner.

It’s purpose is ostensibly to protect the country from attacks like those on 9/11 but none of those attackers were from the countries banned.

Banning citizens of entire countries with whom we are at peace is idiotic: even accepting the thesis that hordes of terrorists are trying to get into the country (which, if they are, the existing system has been protecting us from quite effectively given the small number of domestic attacks since 9/11), they are individuals, not countries. Russia, for example, has a much larger total population, and even a larger Muslim population, than Yemen. China too. If a 90-day travel ban to block potential terrorists is the way to keep us safe it should start with the largest nations, which have the greatest number of such potential malefactors, not seven small ones.

It was announced without any warning or effective preparation for the people who had to implement it.

Result: some airports have been plunged into chaos, thousands of lives of law-abiding people have been disrupted, and part of the order was reversed by the courts.

The president and his team, and by extension Republicans in general, are not up to the job of effective governance, except in the narrowest sense of serving their ignorant, fearful base who will accept any incompetence so long as it serves their prejudices. That won’t be enough to run the country.

I say apparent incompetence because I’m not sure that Trump isn’t intentionally trying to make the country more vulnerable to a major terrorist event. I think he and Bannon secretly welcome that prospect because it would give them the excuse to crack down much harder on all remaining First Amendment, due process, and other rights and freedoms. In effect, they would use the shock of such an attack to declare martial law.

In order to ensure we are vulnerable to an attack, Trump and Bannon, who is now going to run the NSC, have already begun to make sure that we target the wrong people as terrorists and waste our resources building a useless wall. Ultimately, we will leave ourselves much more vulnerable if the Republicans in Congress don’t wake up.

and a lot to do with defining who the enemy is: the liberal order in the West and Islam globally — and beginning the series of actions and provocations designed to engage in an all-out assault on both.